Myescape from life of poverty
Born into chaos, Kerry Hudson had the dice loaded against her from the start. After a traumatic childhood, she eventually broke free from her bleak existence and is now a successful writer. In her new book, she lays bare the horrors of her young life and
WRITER Kerry Hudson’s autobiographical book Lowborn begins with a “happy ending”. She said: “I made it. I rose. I escaped poverty. I escaped bad food because that’s all you can afford. I escaped threadbare clothes and too-tight shoes.
“I probably escaped the early mortality rates and preventable diseases.
“I escaped benefits queues and means assessments and sh***y zero-hour contracts. I escaped hopelessness.”
This wasn’t how Kerry’s story was destined to play out, born as she was into poverty in Aberdeen, with a mother, damaged and damaging, dragging her across the country as unwanted baggage.
Kerry, 38, is now an award-winning novelist, with the comforts of a home and loving partner, a colourful life of arts and travel and teaching creative writing at Cambridge.
But the getaway wasn’t clean. The emotional indentations are still there, in the night terrors and being in a “black hole for love”, no matter how much she was loved in her adult life.
Kerry said: “I am proudly working class and, in this socially mobile hinterland I currently occupy, I miss the sense of community and belonging that tribe might provide me with.
“But I was never proudly poor. True poverty is all-encompassing, grinding, brutal and often dehumanising. The gnawing shame and fear of poverty is not something I have ever missed, particularly since I frequently still experience its aftershocks.”
In Lowborn, Kerry revisits the towns she grew up in, the pins in the zigzagging of a map which saw her attend nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats.
She lists other notable facts – one stay in residential care, a period in foster care, a sexual abuse protection inquiry, two sexual assaults, a rape and two abortions. There is an ugliness to Kerry’s story but she tells it with flowing grace and a skill so luminous it’s little wonder her talents lit the route to escape.
Almost one in four – 230,000 of Scotland’s children are officially recognised as living in poverty and Kerry’s story is more relevant than ever.
It is a story that should be read by the powerless and the powerful, who have the means to stop it from being repeated.
Her mother was 20 when she met Kerry’s father, 42, an American ex-soldier, an alcoholic and a schizophrenic. She had left Aberdeen at 16 and wandered aimlessly. She met him in London, where they lived in a
squat and
left him when he fell to his knees despairing at the news she was pregnant – not that it stopped her trying to hand over Kerry to him a few years later, which he refused.
Her mother had considered abortion and took on motherhood as a sacrifice and a burden she neither wanted nor could handle.
To research the book, Kerry accessed her child protection documents three weeks before Christmas 2017.
Kerry said: “The first few pages were about a referral from the head of my nursery school in Aberdeen, where my mum had turned up ‘drunk and not in a fit state to care for the child’.”
She was taken into emergency foster care. It was September 1983 and she was almost three.
One report talks of her mother going from “crisis to crisis”. The file is full of social work frustrations at her immaturity, at the broken appointments, at her turning up drunk to nursery, neglect, rent arrears and debts, attempts to palm off her child on whoever would take her.
Over the years, Kerry lived in many areas – Aberdeen, Airdrie, Liverpool and Great Yarmouth.
After spells in foster care and contrary to social work concerns, Kerry was returned time and again to her mother, to the chaos and temper and her volatile boyfriend.
In a homeless hostel that passed off as a B&B, strange, drunk and angry men lurked in the communal spaces and in the streets in sink estates, there were fights and aggression.
Kerry was always the new girl, a geek, the poor kid in the sinking sand of her mother’s version of a home. She talks of going to a new school in the same clothes for two weeks and being the kid who smelled.
But on returning to some of her childhood homes, she was welcomed. And in Aberdeen, she found that walking its streets, learning of the fisherwomen of her heritage, gave her a sense of roots that her nomadic existence had not permitted before.
Kerry said: “I remembered these places as quite scary but I was reminded of the warmth and kindness and humour that exist in those communities even when they are struggling.”
Kerry is keen to emphasise that her mother was a victim of sorts, too.
She said: “From the moment a child is born, if the mother is defenceless and poor, then the struggle begins as soon as the first air burns into its tiny lungs.”
Kerry said writing the book was “life-changing”.
She added: “It was hard to do but wonderful. I have come out the other side so much stronger and with a greater understanding and more pride.
“I had kept a lot of the things secret and the silence suggested they were shameful. Undoing years of that behaviour was very difficult but also the most liberating thing.”
She has dedicated the book to “all of you who have lived this story, too” .
Going back to the places of her childhood, she found communities “plugging the holes” of the welfare state.
Kerry added: “In many ways, things are much worse. Child poverty is on the increase. In three decades, why has that not got better but worse?
“If the book does anything, I hope it helps people to see that what I experienced is still happening and we all have a responsibility to help change it.”